Attempts to skip commercials in broadcast TV are well-known. Many of these attempts correlate over the video in order to identify portions of the video which are likely to represent commercials. So-called replayTV units, available from Sonic Blue Inc., form a digital VCR which digitizes the incoming television and records it on a hard drive. The digital VCR records the signal, forms some kind of index that has information for use in locating the commercials, and during playback, automatically skips these commercials.
This device may work remarkably well, however there are concerns that such a device may violate copyright laws. Moreover, there are times when a user might want to skip other sections of video that are not commercials.